


elpis stayed behind

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: Of Gearheaded Geeks and Alchemy Freaks (EdWin Week 2019) [6]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: EdWin Week 2019, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, Nightmares, Post-Promised Day, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 04:51:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18731959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For EdWin Week 2019. Day 6: Dreams/Nightmares“I’m fine,” she says, waving the question away. “Just didn’t sleep too well. Nothing to worry about.”





	elpis stayed behind

_The heft of the gun feels right._

_It feels like it belongs. It weighs her down because the rage surging through her is threatening to burn her up, to flood her so suddenly in a scorching wave that there won’t be anything left and at least the metal mechanism in her hands will keep her grounded._

_Her finger hovers over the trigger. He’s right there. He killed her parents. He deserves it. He even said so. The pale mark stretched across his dark face is practically a target._

_Ed shouts. She doesn’t hear. She fires._

_BA—_

Winry wakes with a jolt.

* * *

“You feeling alright?” Ed asks the next morning. She must have circles under her eyes, or must not look as well-rested as she usually does.

And she smiles, because he doesn’t need to be burdened with such silly things. Only just a handful of months have passed since Ed and Al returned, triumphant, mostly restored back to their proper selves with the sole exception of Ed’s leg (he didn’t seem too broken up over it, though). Even now, it still dizzies her to remember that they are here, in the house, with Al sleeping soundly for the first time in years and their presence not just a fleeting shadow to come and go as it pleased, but has rather anchored itself deeply. And she’s happy for them.

It’s not without complications, of course. Ed still seems unused to lingering in one place too long, grappling with boredom and contentment and trying to figure out how to separate the two. Al, meanwhile, now has to face the unpleasant reality of slumber that provides just as much horror as restfulness.

They don’t need to worry about her.

“I’m fine,” she says, waving the question away. “Just didn’t sleep too well. Nothing to worry about.”

* * *

The dream isn’t new. It isn’t old, though, either.

It stalks her in the aftermath of Central, of seeing Ed bloody and his clothes torn and confronting her parents’ killer. It pops up infrequently, when the days are too troubling and the nights are too still and stress fractures spread across her mind, which allows the darkness to seep its way through.

Sometimes it’s hard to forget how the metal felt against her fingertips. Sometimes it’s hard to forget that she actually picked the gun up in the first place.

It’s awfully frequent, as of late. These days, it’s often accompanied by the miserable scarlet torrent she glimpsed briefly on the Promised Day—she never did tell Ed or Al about that, figures its best put behind her, that lingering too much on it won’t do anyone any good. Besides, she doesn’t want to encroach upon their happiness. They don’t need to worry about the fact that she wakes in the middle of the night with her heart in her throat and then often can’t fall back asleep.

Besides, she does some of her best work at night. When restlessness crawls under her eyelids and the adrenaline refuses to abate, she whispers her way down the halls to take solace in the seclusion of the workshop. Granny found her there once and bid her back to bed, so every time since she’s made an extra effort to be careful. To be quiet.

Mechanics relaxes her. Drawing diagrams, tinkering. Anything. It chases the memory away.

For a while, anyway.

Sometimes the metal in her hands feels too much like the cool kiss of the gun’s casing. Sometimes the smear of motor oil looks like the smudge of gunpowder. Sometimes when she blasts the torch, the initial punch of it igniting sounds almost identical to a gunshot, and she images a recoil rippling through her bones.

Dammit.

* * *

Ed finds her exactly three days later.

In the low glow of the lanternlight, she nearly mistakes the gleam of his exposed automail for the steel body of a firearm, her heart leaping to her throat at the prospect of her dreams following her into reality. But then she catches the ochre gleam of his eyes in the darkness, the expression that shadows play off of, and the fear melts almost as instantly as it came.

Perhaps he sees. Perhaps he realizes that there are shadows lurking in his mind, because he crosses the distance and sits down next to her. Silently, he eyes the bits and bobs scattered all across her worktable that aren’t actually anything functional, just there for to keep her mind from growing too idle, lest it sink back into the echoes of dark dreaming. It seems like he wants to say something, but from the scrunch in his brow and the twitch in his mouth, it’s clear that he isn’t entirely sure how to phrase his concern. Leave it to Edward Elric to let “are you okay?” hang thick in the air, unspoken only by virtue of a general incapacity to string words together in a way that is gentle enough to suffice.

And maybe she’s tired. Maybe she’s exhausted and bone-weary from too little sleep and too much fear and his presence at her side is golden and solid, because she finds herself saying, “I dreamed about shooting Scar.”

He looks up at her in surprise, with an expression that is almost stricken, but he doesn’t say anything. She looks at his arm—his restored arm, the triumph over his personal demons, the skin pale from so little contact with sunlight and the muscles stretched thin over solid bone. Disuse and atrophy cling to it mercilessly.

She remembers when she first turned it over in her hands to the sound of Ed laughing brightly over the fact that she couldn’t yell at him about breaking his arm anymore, remembers that the palm was strangely smooth because it hadn’t accrued as many callouses as its twin. It was also largely untouched by the roughness of time, no scarring or callouses as evidence of the hard years spent just trying to regain it.

Remembers disappointment, just a flicker, even as she was thrilled for him. Maybe because of all the time and hard work and love and care she spent on the prosthetic arm, and how it all suddenly meant nothing. If she were an alchemist, she would have mused rather bitterly that it wasn’t much of an Equivalent Exchange—but she isn’t an alchemist, doesn’t live by that principle, and she is not so selfish that she would tarnish his exuberance at the restoration with something so petty.

Besides, now she’ll never have to feel the coolness of metal fingers against her hands again, gently teasing the gun from her fingers until it slips from her grip and clatters brokenly to the ground.

“Tell me about it,” Ed says, and it seems he’s forgone subtly in exchange for getting to the root of the problem faster.

Hesitation claims her for a moment, but then his restored arm reaches out, skinny fingers entwining with hers, and somehow, she finds the strength to slowly, haltingly, start to describing the scene.

Baschool, visions of Scar, injured and bleeding, with a gun clutched in her hand. Her arm swinging like a pendulum at her side. Ed, trying to talk her down again, just like he had in Central. Her, not listening. Aiming. Firing. Waking with the smell of blood in her throat and the echo of a gunshot in her ears.

Suddenly, she realizes her eyes are stinging hotly and her breaths are a little choppy and she blinks but doesn’t reach up to banish the blurriness from her vision. “What do you think would have happened, if I had shot him that day?”

It looks like he wants to reach up and wipe her tears away, but he always holds himself back. Even now, when there is no reason for it and nothing to punish himself over, he holds himself back. “You wouldn’t have.”

Her grip on his hand tightens. “Imagine I did.”

His expression pinches remorsefully. “You’re gonna drive yourself crazy asking yourself that, Win.”

“I’m not asking myself.” She sniffs and blinks and feels a tear spill over. “I’m asking  _you_.”

Ed opens his mouth, but no reply comes. In his eyes, though, she can see shadows and whispers, hazy forms of what-if that hover like specters lingering in the doorway getting ready to reap their souls. She glances again at their interlocking fingers and she swears his hand looks like someone stretched ivory leather over a skeleton.

What must it have been like, to see her like that? She knows that fear struck her hard to witness him in a bloodied, battered state, his eyes blazing with a rage that bordered upon murderous. Knows that seeing him like that would have stuck with her a lot longer if his declaration of Scar’s sins hadn’t reached her ears just then—if she didn’t notice the gun lying conveniently on the ground as her knees just dropped out from underneath her. Knows that his eyes widened as he watched her, that horror took hold of his features before the world narrowed into just herself and Scar and the trembling firearm clutched in her sweaty palms.

Knows that she has never been a pretty crier, probably never will be, and that she had never known what it meant for crying to actually hurt until that day.

What must have gone through his head, she wonders. What must he have thought of her, just then?

“Do you think he’s still alive?” she asks.

His shoulders rise into a hunch, and he was the one that told her—that pulled her aside sometime when Granny and Al were caught in a lively and engrossing conversation at the dinner table, and he whispered to her in a half-lit hallway that Scar was MIA. Lost somewhere in the rubble. Maybe dead, maybe not, but no one knows for sure. No way to be certain. She was very, very quiet for the rest of the night.

Even now, she can’t tell if she’s relieved or not.

“I don’t know if I  _want_  him to be dead or not,” she confesses. It comes out in a hushed, wavering whisper through a throat that is far too tight and accompanied by a sudden catch in her breath and a sniffle that sounds piteously childish. “I don’t know. I-I just don’t  _know_.”

And then suddenly she is crushed against his chest in an embrace of strong arms and childhood comfort, with fingers in her hair and her face buried in his shoulder and she’s not quite crying yet, but her breaths are coming out in choppy rasps that are so, so close to becoming sobs. She curls her fists into his shirt and inhales the smell of him, the warmth of his skin, the softness of golden hair that isn’t bound up in a braid like usual. Imagines she can feel the liquid saffron of his gaze on her.

“You’re not that sort of person,” he murmurs.

Which would be a comfort—except.

“I didn’t think I was the type of person to pick up a gun, either.”

And it would have been very easy to just—snap the trigger back, let the bullet loose and watch a scarlet hole bloom in its wake. It scares her how easy it would have been.

“Have you ever heard of Pandora’s box?” he asks suddenly.

Sniffing, she blinks. Her eyes are still wet. “The—the story about the woman who opened a box and released evil into the world?”

“Yeah. That.”

“What about it?”

Slowly, he pulled away, just enough so that they’re facing one another. Tentatively, he reaches up to thumb at a tear track on her cheek. “After she opened the box and all these terrible things came out, she noticed that there was something still left inside—hope. And then she closed the box again.”

“Yeah, she trapped hope,” Winry says, and reaches up to wipe at her eyes and leave salty wet smudges over her lashes, “so there was only despair.”

“Some think that.” His eyes are molten gold in the shadows, gleam in the lanternlight, beacons against the darkness. She always forgets just how vivid they are, how intense they are, how easily they melt you from the inside out with their smoldering intensity—but now they’re soft, gentle in a way reminds her so much of how he looked at when she collapsed on the cobblestone Central streets that it aches. “Others think she did it to keep hope with her.”

And then he reaches out to brush hair out of her face and she wonders, really wonders, when he grew so gentle. When the rough-and-tumble little brat who used to torment her softened so much. “You need to trust yourself. Have some faith.”

She can’t help it—an incredulous little laugh leaves her, because how many times has he beat himself up over something that wasn’t even directly his fault? How many times has he wrestled with blame and guilt and self-loathing and now finds himself being the one to tell her she’s being too hard on herself? “This, coming from  _you_.”

A tentative smile twitches on his face. It’s a sight to behold. “Crazy, right?”

 _Yeah_ , she thinks.  _Crazy._

Crazy because of all the people to tell her that, of course it would come from the one person who is most intimate with nightmares and unspoken fears. And with all the things he went through, perhaps it says something that he actually has faith in her.

“C’mon.” He’s snared her hand again when she wasn’t paying attention, as he rises to his feet, he tugs her along with him. “Get some sleep.”

“Mm. Okay.” Her bones feel stiff and too-heavy as she rises up from her workbench, chafing on her thighs and exhaustion weighing at her eyelids—but something deep down feels a little lighter, just a bit. It’s not fully mended, but it’s a start. It’s a start. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He tugs her up the stairs and into the darkened halls and she could swear there’s a touch of reluctance in his gaze as their hands detangle. As they stop before her door and separate. For a moment, he looks like he’s going to ask to stay with her—but he holds back, perhaps he’s just so used to it by now that he doesn’t know how not to.

God. What a hypocrite.

“Night,” she says.

“Sweet dreams,” is his reply.

The softness of her bed is a benediction, and the uninterrupted sleep that follows is sublime. When morning greets her, if feels like an assurance for restful nights.

**Author's Note:**

> I wonder about that scene sometimes.


End file.
